You Decide the Menu at the Next Hottest Restaurant

The stars did not align for Dinner Lab's first meal. Few tickets sold, and the silverware came from a nearby pawn shop. The roof collapsed at their temporary kitchen. One employee abruptly quit. "We thought, maybe this is a sign we shouldn't be doing this," says CEO Brian Bordainick.

Two years later the community dining experience, which pairs eager foodies with menus drawn up by rising stars in the culinary industry, is a hot meal ticket. Hipsters now celebrate Dinner Lab's mismatched pawn shop silverware and unconventional dining locations — factories, piers, helipads, motorcycle dealerships — and its membership wait list numbers in the thousands (only members can attend dinners, and each city's roster is capped at around 2,000 heads). The brand did this while avoiding traditional publicity, instead letting word of mouth and occasional press do the talking.

So Dinner Lab's next move seems surprisingly conventional, save for a clever twist. Bordainick and co. now plan to open a traditional brick-and-mortar restaurant — except they're turning to the wisdom of the crowd to dictate the menu and overall experience.

"Our goal is to mitigate the high mortality rate of restaurants," Bordainick says. "The only way to do that is to listen to people."

A chef prepares a Dinner Lab meal in Austin, Texas.

Image: Dinner Lab, Nicolai McCrary

In the typical Dinner Lab setup, members access a calendar of meals offered in their city and pay a premium to reserve a seat. The evening's menu is prepared by one of a rotating cast of sous chefs and chefs de cuisine, veterans of top-tier restaurants who don't necessarily get to flex their menu-making muscles at their day jobs. (One menu for a New Orleans feast included quail eggs and crawfish bisque, alligator served with green onion croquette, turtle chowder, confit frog legs and kumquat-rubbed catfish grilled in a banana leaf. The theme was "Swamp 2 Table.")

Diners don't know where they'll be eating until the last minute: Members are emailed the location details one day in advance, and it's always some place exotic — like, say, perched above seven full-size basketball courts at a New York sports club.

After the meal, attendees fill out feedback cards that are handed to the chef, hopefully with compliments, which she can use to hone her craft and refine future menus. High-ranked chefs may be flown to other Dinner Lab events around the country for encore performances.

"I don't need a New York Times restaurant critic to tell me what's good or what's bad," Bordainick says of the arrangement. "I'd rather normalize the data from hundreds of people."

A Dinner Lab entree.

Image: Dinner Lab, Nicolai McCrary

Now, Bordainick plans to gather all that data, crunch the numbers and iterate, iterate, iterate until he's whipped up a restaurant concept that's too user-friendly to fail. He doesn't know which of Dinner Lab's 10 host cities will house this new space, or what the menu will contain. ("You can imagine the joy of raising money for this restaurant: 'I can't tell you which chef, which cuisine, which location, but please give us money,'" he says).

Instead of the top-down, restaurateur-driven business model, those little feedback cards will make all the decisions for him.

In addition to letting users comment on their favorite parts of a meal, Bordainick also plans to look at pre-dinner ticket sales to see what type of cuisine gets members' stomachs growling. He'll analyze data at both a micro and macro level, for instance, seeing what type of cuisine piques diners' interest in New York or San Francisco (might we suggest kale?), as well as what's trending across the nation.

With anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 members in each city and up to 100 events per city per year, that's a lot of data to parse.

Among the chefs who will be attempting to please the mob are Paras Shah, an alumnus of New York's Per Se and Momofuku Noodle Bar, Brandon Byrd, a Momofuku and Best Pizza veteran currently serving up farm-to-table "hot weather food" at Lenoir in Austin, as well as fellow Texan Janelle Reynolds, last year's Chopped champion.

Diners check their menus.

Image: Dinner Lab Nicolai McCrary

It should be said that the wisdom of the crowd is not always sound. The couple who are letting the Internet name their daughter, for example, may wind up with a child named Chthulu. But Dinner Lab's audience is made up of well-meaning, well-paying foodies, so perhaps they'll be spared the crowd's tendency to crack wise.

The restaurant, unlike Dinner Lab events, will be open to the public. In an effort to gather as much data as possible, Dinner Lab will begin offering up to 150 new memberships in each of its 10 host cities, beginning Wednesday, March 19 — as well as twice as many monthly meals. Over the next few months, Dinner Lab's events will be focused more than ever on gathering feedback from its diners, honing and refining a restaurant concept as they go.

"Anything we put our name to is going to come from the world of experimentation or iteration," says Bordainick. "We're not afraid to roll out a chef after a couple of months or completely throw out a menu."

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